Paperweight
by mo.texas55
Summary: Carrying April O'Neil is effortless. But carrying the weight of being torn apart is almost too heavy a load to bear.


**So this one immediately follows the events of "The Power Inside Her." I can't imagine Donnie and April's relationship didn't experience any awkwardness after what happened, so I wrote this bit to express the kind of discomfort I felt they would encounter after the whole zapping-Donnie-to-pieces thing took place.**

 **Warning: there's not a very happy resolution here. But it feels realistic to me, so there you go. And warning #2: the story, in terms of what's actually happening in the present, is constantly interrupted by Donatello's musings of everything that happened in the episode. So, don't get too confused.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own Apritello, as much as I would love to. These characters do not belong to me ... Oh well. Also, the image is by lorna-ka on DeviantArt.**

 **Anywho, proceed, read, enjoy, and let me know what you think.**

* * *

It never ceased to amaze him how weightless she was, nor how much warmth she contained in such a petite physique. Technically, he supposed, she was pretty average in size compared to other human teenage girls, but to him she would always be perfectly small, perfectly light, and a vessel of heat that he would never get the chance to embrace often enough.

But she was asleep now, body completely relaxed in his arms as though swayed by his movement as he carried her out of the pit. Her hair fell in a sheet of ginger across his elbow pad, occasionally brushing against his skin with a tickle. Her head fit perfectly in the crook of his arm. And over time her expression had allowed in a blanket of peace the further she'd slipped into sleep. There no longer plagued creases of discomfort and pain on her forehead.

It had not taken her long to drift off again after she'd woken from passing out the first time. She'd had enough time to apologize to them, give her powers a tentative test (to the wariness of all the boys), and begrudgingly submit to Splinter's insistence that she eat something and sip on a cup of tea.

She had placed herself crisscross in the far corner of the bench, and Donatello had noticed her dozing off with just enough time to catch her mug from falling out of her hands. She hadn't batted an eye after that.

He'd stretched her out across the bench, nestled her head against a pillow, and draped a blanket over her, giving her a time to rest and a chance to reawaken on her own, but after a couple of hours had passed, it was clear she was done for the night.

Now it was time to take her home.

And it was funny, in the most non-comical way, here she was light as a feather, as they say, tucked in his arms and his protection, and yet he himself felt so heavy as he carried her. He felt weighted, pulled down by the hunger of gravity like there was a magnetic paperweight sinking down in his stomach. It took more effort than usual to pick his feet up as he walked. His knees seemed to creak as they bent. His shoulders sagged.

What was this feeling? he wondered, gazing down at the girl in his arms. Wasn't it over? Hadn't all damage been done and moved on to a period of rebuilding, reconstructing, healing? Wasn't she safe? She was with him right? She was always safe with him … Always.

* * *

It shivered, floating there in a way that was restless and far from pacified. The light it emitted was both bright with anger and eerily alive. It was a living soul trapped in the confines of a translucent stone, burning to get out. It had no body, no face, no heart, no blood, no warmth, and yet he could feel its hatred—hatred that was directed solely at him.

He was keeping it imprisoned, stuck to the point on his desk where Raph had unforgivingly nailed it down. It was trying to get away, begging to get away, and he knew exactly where it wanted to go, exactly what it was after.

He narrowed his eyes at it, chin hiding behind his fists as his lips turned down at the corners. He hunched his shoulders over his desk, elbows perched on the edge, daring to get close to it as though it might feel intimidation, as though it might fear the fire in his eyes.

"You can't have her," he said quietly.

The crystal responded with a quiver, radiating a rage that made him nauseous. It also made him grit his teeth and stand over it like an opponent.

" _I_ am her protector," he said, louder this time. "She doesn't need you."

The crystal flared with light. He could feel a discharge of heat, of electricity prickling his skin. It burned.

"She doesn't. Need. You."

A high-pitched frequency grated against his ears, and he might have thought he'd imagined it if the light bulb over his desk hadn't popped with an explosion of charred glass.

He jumped, stepping back an inch with his gaze fixed on the white-hot coil once belonging to the bulb. It cooled through a regression of yellow, orange and red, and then finally went black. He swallowed and looked back at the crystal. It continued to float in silence, just as ever agitated.

He wrinkled his nose at it then turned and shuffled through the cabinet he kept locked behind his desk. He pulled out the staff he'd gotten from Fugitoid and fired it up as he walked back around the desk to face the crystal, this time rolling around his desk chair to place in between them.

"Alright, Aeon crystal," he said, adjusting the settings on his staff. "You want April?" He knelt with one knee on the chair and pointed his weapon at it. "You're going to have to go through me first."

* * *

He set her down carefully in Raph's seat. It was the closest to the floor of the Shellraiser, not a bed but she didn't seem uncomfortable. He made sure her head was rested against the wall and buckled her in, then just paused to stare.

He'd relieved his arms but the weight was still there, still sinking, still pushing him into the ground.

It hadn't worked. And why would it? Facing off against an alien crystal with a technically enhanced bō staff? It was still a stick, no matter how many cool things it could do. And really he still wondered if he hadn't made matters worse by giving the crystal an electric charge—not that he was really going for that. But it had felt like a pull, like whatever being was inhabiting the crystal had gripped the end of his staff and tried to yank it out of his hands. It fought him, but it had been doing that for a while, much longer, in fact, than just through the events of that evening.

 _She should wear her hair down more often_ , he thought.

But he would tell her that later. It was time to get her home, time to tuck her away in bed. Surely then she'd truly be safe.

He sat himself in the driver's seat and started up the Shellraiser before carefully easing the throttle forward and guiding the subway car down the tracks.

He glanced back once, just to make sure she was undisturbed, then he didn't look back again.

* * *

He'd been watching the anger creep up on her for a long time. It came like a breeze at first, barely noticed against her smile, against her excitement, against the joy of being back at home, back on earth, and of finally entering the last few weeks of training to become a kunoichi.

He'd taken it as determination for a while. When she set her jaw and rammed her heel into Raph's plastron so hard that it sent him flying back into the tree across the dojo, they'd all swallowed it with a laugh—even Raph, though it made him wince. Of course she was getting stronger, and even Splinter had commented with praise on the way she focused her energy.

When she shouted at Mikey for spilling a can of Sprite on her Chemistry book, Donnie had thought it completely valid. Maybe a little off temper for her, but school was stressing her out. That was normal. And she'd even apologized to the freckled turtle for snapping.

When he and Splinter sat side-by-side overseeing "psychic target practice," he'd been impressed the first couple of times she'd impaled the sackcloth dummy with half a dozen shuriken. It wasn't until after she sent her tessen slicing through its neck, decapitating the dummy purely with her mind, that he found himself biting back a frown as she gazed unapologetically at the sand and cotton mixture seeping out of the dummy's wound like blood.

But he hadn't been truly unsettled until he was forced to watch her fight with Shinigami. She wasn't happy, and it was the first time he'd seen her enraged like that in a long time. In fact, the fury in her gaze was not one he could ever remember seeing, not even after she'd sworn off being their friend when they'd accidentally mutated her father.

No. This anger was different. And it wasn't so much April as it was darkness. The surprise on Shinigami's face had completely mirrored Donatello's own shock when April had shattered the glass in Shredder's old lair. It didn't much concern him that her powers had become visibly destructive as much as it disturbed him that that blow had been meant for a living, breathing person. He hadn't been able to allow it to go any further after April hit the ground. Not because he felt bad that she was losing the fight, but because he could see her relinquishing control. Thankfully, she'd been responsive to his touch, but he shuddered to think what might have happened had he not approached her.

Forget revisiting the way she'd acted the night Mikey took her crystal. Her reaction constantly sat like the plague in the back of his mind. It wasn't something he ever wished to see again. And when they'd told Donnie what happened with the Super Shredder, he could only wince.

And he knew the source. With every red flag warning him to watch her, his eyes drifted to that crystal resting with perfect satisfaction against her chest. He'd tried bringing up the subject gently, tried hinting that he was growing concerned, tried to coax it from her as tenderly as possible, but she wouldn't have it. And with every moment that she snapped at him, and yelled at him, and threatened him, he swore he could feel the pulse of that alien soul fitting itself between them, pushing them apart, pulling her away. And that scared him.

* * *

The drive to her apartment felt like it had been tampered with by a certain apprentice of Time. It took eons, and yet one second he was driving along the tracks in the tunnels and the next he was parking the Shellraiser in the alley beside her building.

He picked her up with care. The weight had never left.

He made sure there was no one in the street when he knocked on the door to Second Time About. Kirby answered in the midst of rubbing his eye, and the moment he took in Donatello standing on the stoop with an unconscious April in his arms, he became visibly panicked.

"What happened? Is she alright? Were you guys in a fight? Is it the Kraang?"

"It's alright, Mr. O'Neil," Donnie said with an exhausted smile, stepping inside once Kirby jerkily moved out of the way. "She's fine. She just fell asleep."

If April wanted her father to know that she'd been possessed by an ancient, genocidal, alien soul from a galaxy far far away and had nearly scattered her friends into molecular smears across New York City, she could tell him when she woke up.

"Oh," Kirby said with a sigh, closing the door and encasing them in shadows. He stepped up beside Donatello as he made his way toward the stairs and gazed down at his daughter with a furrowed brow as though to check for himself that she was certainly undamaged.

The creases smoothed away after a moment and he smiled with a soft hum. "Her hair is down."

Donatello pressed his lips together. "Yeah."

"She never wears it down … She looks just like her mother."

Donnie swallowed. The weight only seemed to get heavier. "I'll take her to her room for you."

Kirby blinked himself out of a daze and glanced at the turtle. "Hm? Oh yeah, that's fine, Donatello. Thank you."

Donnie passed down another smile before turning his shell on the man and climbing the stairs.

* * *

What words were there to explain what it felt like to see her that way? Hair loose and floating on stagnant air, eyes white and thoughtless, the cerulean blue irises gone, the shine of laughter and joy gone, devoid of all emotion except that of power and a monstrous wrath he could not define.

He didn't remember how he'd ended up under a pile of rubble in the lair. He'd been too focused on fearing for her, fearing of her, and not recognizing the lines of her face anymore. One minute she was there, attacking him and his already-crippled father, and the next she was gone.

And the dread had oozed down through his shell like someone had poured a bucket of mutagen over his head. He'd had no idea where she was going, what that alien soul wanted from her. This wasn't the first time he'd had to rush to her aid and rescue, and like every other time, he was confident that if he could just get to her she'd be fine. But there was a looming threat in that crystal that felt frightfully personal this time. And not even just to her, but to him. It already considered him a threat. What if it wouldn't allow him to get close enough? What if he wasn't quick enough to separate it from her? What if she really _wanted_ it there?

But he'd had to brush that thought away. Such contingencies weren't allowed to matter when he still needed to track her down. So he'd swiped the scanner from his lab and ran for the surface.

Once upon a time, she had tried to fight him on the update he'd given to his tracking methods. Hardly a month before the end of the world, he'd decided they needed a better way to know where everyone was at all times—just in case. (The idea had actually come to him not long after the mock _Saw_ incident with brain-controlled Karai … Because being duped by a holographic April had stung just a little bit.)

"Is this really necessary?" April had asked him, eyes glancing back and forth as she fidgeted on the chair in his lab.

"Unfortunately," had been his response as he carefully coated dental cement inside of the crown he'd prepared for her over the course of three weeks after getting the moldings from her molars.

"It really doesn't seem extreme to you? I mean, what's wrong with the trackers in our T-phones?"

"T-phones get lost," he mumbled without looking away from his work. "T-phones break. T-phones get left behind—especially by you. T-phones also get stolen by enemies and signals run both ways. The phone itself is just as easy to trace down as its memories are to trace backward. And that's not something we want."

He finally straightened up and brought the crown over to her with a dental pick in his other hand. She wrinkled her nose at it.

He sighed. "Open up."

She turned her eyes up to him with a stubborn yet pleading gaze.

"April, come on it's not that bad. Everyone else got one, even Casey."

"Really?" she said, brow raised.

"Yep, and he fought me harder than Raph did. I've got the bruises to prove it."

She pursed her lips and crossed her arms. "What about you?"

He used the tool to point to a clear container on the opposite end of his desk. "Mine's still molding. And when it's done, if you like, you can have the pleasure of putting it in for me."

She tried to hold back her smile, but it didn't work. "Really?"

"Yes, but you first. Open."

She'd heaved a giant sigh but obeyed.

And he never regretted forcing past the stubborn front she'd given him that day, because were it not for that, he may have found her too late when she was under Za'Naron's control.

Maybe instead of him she would have pulled apart the molecules of one of his brothers, or Casey, or an innocent bystander. And that was something he shuddered to think about.

* * *

After shouldering his way into her room, he crossed over to her bed and bent at the waist to ease her onto the mattress. He was extra slow to take his hands out from underneath her, then gingerly slipped the boots from her feet.

It wasn't until he started to pull the comforter over her body that she popped up out of her sleep with a gasp and snatched his bicep with cold fingers.

"Whoa whoa, it's okay," he said, tone hushed. He rested a hand on her shoulder and noted the shiver of her body. "It's alright. You're home, April. It's okay."

She blinked at him multiple times, eyes wide and bouncing back and forth around her room as she tried to catch her breath and make sense of where she was. He eased himself down on the edge of her bed, shushing her all the while, and brushed the hair back that was sticking to her forehead with sweat. Her grip tightened around his arm, but after a second of panic, she began to relax, tempering her breathing as she met his gaze.

He didn't miss the movement of her hand reaching for her chest, but it found nothing to hold onto.

The smile he'd been attempting to give her turned stale.

"Wh-When did I fall asleep?" she asked, looking around again.

"A couple hours ago. I thought you'd be more comfortable in your own bed."

She blinked back at him, stared for a moment, then nodded.

He tried that smile again and managed at least a grimace he thought. "I'm gonna head back. Do you need anything?"

She shook her head.

"Okay," he said, but as soon as he started to stand, her fingers latched around his arm again, pulling him back down.

"Wait."

"What?"

She stared into his eyes for a while, to the point that it was uncomfortable. He could feel a heat blossoming in his cheeks. And the weight got heavier. "You're upset."

His shoulders dropped, and he frowned. He couldn't help it. His body sank into the mattress and he put his hands in his lap, palms up, examining them until he could gather his thoughts together.

He wasn't going to lie to her of course. There was no point in it. They'd both been through one heck of a night, and the awkwardness that had come in the aftermath was unavoidable. Tension. He'd never thought there'd be any like this between them, but there it was, and it couldn't stay.

"No," he said to his fingers. "Not upset. Just … sad." With this he looked at her and the crease that formed on her brow. It tightened his stomach around that paperweight like a vacuum. He could feel its shape, its form, its mass, like a ball of solid metals just sitting there in his gut.

"I thought I could protect you," he said slowly. "I mean, that's my job. It always has been—from Foot soldiers, Karai, Shredder, mutants and weird aliens and ghosts that come out of nowhere. I never …" He swallowed and curled his hands into fists, staring down at them again.

"I never imagined I'd have to protect you from yourself," he mumbled before slowly lifting his eyes to meet her gaze again. He could see the pain lingering there in her expression, in her eyes. "And I couldn't do it," he said. "External threats I understand, I know, I can deal with. But this thing it was internal, it was like a virus, a sickness, and I watched it overshadow you. I watched it turn you into something I didn't recognize, so I tried to analyze it. And I knew the risks of putting you under the neural transmitter again. I didn't learn my lesson the first time, and I made it worse for you. I made it … I allowed it to take over you."

"Donnie, it wasn't your fault," April said, placing a hand on top of his. She grimaced. "Not even close. I mean, if anybody's to blame it's me. I was the one that …"

She stopped, her eyes searching his, staring into what was now the past. And he knew what she was thinking. He knew what it was that paled her cheeks and made her lips pull down.

"That wasn't you," he said before she could address the issue herself.

"Yes it was," she whispered.

"Well you weren't yourself," he countered, unable to meet the look she gave him even as he said it. "I don't blame you."

She was quiet for a while, staring at the side of his face as he squinted at the curtains hiding her window, the one he was going to leave through as soon as she let him.

"But it hurt you."

The ball in his stomach tightened, became more compressed and present. He swallowed against a swell of nausea and bit the inside of his lip. He tilted his head, but still didn't look back at her. And neither did he respond.

"I don't think this is about you not being able to protect me," she said. Her fingers squeezed his hand and it sent a shiver up his neck that he wasn't quite fond of.

"I think this is about you not being able to protect yourself … _from_ me."

He glanced, barely, just enough to see the red in her hair, and already his vision began to blur at the corners. He furrowed his brow against the sting in his eyes, against the emotion he didn't expect to be there that surged forth so quickly.

Was she right? He didn't even know. His instinct was to say of course not. It wasn't about him. But the knot in his throat said otherwise, said there was something in that paperweight in his stomach that he wasn't addressing, something that he was afraid of.

"It's okay to feel that way you know," April said, and he could see her hanging her head in his peripheral vision. "It'd be weird if you didn't. I mean I—we—literally shattered you to pieces. I'm sure it hurt … and maybe not just physically?"

He felt her eyes glance back up again, and this time, after swallowing, he forced himself to look back. Her eyes widened with a glimmer of hope, attentive, letting him know that she was listening and waiting for him to say something about being afraid of her and admitting to the hurt. But while he parted his lips and took in a breath, he couldn't bring himself to say anything in response. He just grimaced and released the breath through his nose. She frowned again.

"Donnie, why is it so hard for you to admit that?"

"Because you want me to blame you."

She pinched her lips together, and he didn't miss the way her body leaned back. She exhaled through her nose in a huff. "If you—"

"I won't do that, April," he said. "I refuse. What I saw was not you. What I felt was not you. It was terrifying," he admitted with a nod. "I was scared, but more for you than anything. Because this thing it—it got between us."

He looked down at her hand, pale and slender, barely covering his own. He slid his palm underneath it and let her fingers rest there as he examined them against the green of his skin.

"It hated me," he whispered, watching his fingers curl around her hand. "And I could see that in your eyes for a long time."

He glanced up, searching her gaze as though tentatively looking to make sure the hatred wasn't still there. Her eyes were blue, clear, filled with remorse but not a drop of anger. He let his shoulders fall some more and looked away again.

"I was afraid it was becoming you. I couldn't tell for a while what was you and what wasn't, until I just didn't recognize you anymore. I was hurt because I realized I didn't have the power to get you back. I couldn't get rid of that hatred that had become you, and it made me …"

He couldn't continue. He didn't know how. Were there even words to explain it?

How was he to explain to this girl whom he loved that he had always been afraid of her rejection, always been afraid of her anger and her hatred. Feared it like it was a monster just waiting for him to peek around the corner, to do something wrong, to slip up somewhere so that she could release it and let it devour him. Since the very moment that she'd flinched away from him after the fiasco had occurred with her father's mutation, he'd been afraid of her dismissal.

It had haunted him for a long time, the burning glare pointed directly at him, the accusatory finger she stabbed in his direction and her breathless objection of "Don't touch me!" He'd known he deserved it then, and every moment afterward he'd been afraid that he still deserved it, that she still had the right in her to scream at him and glare at him and turn him away out of anger.

He'd tiptoed around that fear for over a year, becoming less and less concerned about it as the time went by and she remained a forgiving and occasionally affectionate April … And then this happened. The moment that crystal began to change her was the moment that fear was breathed back to life. He wanted to help her, but internally he could only find himself drawing away, because the snapping and the snarling and the bursts of outrage fueled old nightmares of cowering under her, shivering inside of his shell while he watched her point fingers at him and scream and glare and burn.

Everything that he had dreaded encountering had been the very thing he'd had to face in every moment leading up to that handful of seconds before she'd literally torn him apart from the inside out. And he shivered thinking about it now. But how could he tell her that, and why did it linger? Why could he still taste it? Why did he still fear it?

"Maybe I deserved it," he said out loud, eyes staring but seeing nothing.

"What?"

He looked at her and the incredulous way her mouth stood agape. "I couldn't help you."

She choked. "And so you think you deserved to be punished for that?" She swallowed and it looked painful. "Donnie …"

"Just tell me something," he said quietly. A sharp pain pulled at his chest and he had to lock his jaw to fight against it taking his breath away, but even still his next words came out winded. "All those times you got mad … when you snapped at me, and you screamed, and you threw things around in my lab … was any of that real, or was it all just the crystal? Was it—was it my fault?"

"Donnie, please stop."

"I have to know, April." He stared, eyes wide and silent, until his vision blurred over. When he blinked, he was surprised by the tear that escaped, and even more surprised that it was quickly followed by another, and yet he did nothing to ban them.

"I'm sorry if I made you angry," he said in a whisper now. "If I—if I made it … I made it worse. I'm so sorry. I thought I could help you."

"God," was all April seemed able to say, and he wasn't meant to hear it. It came out as an exhale of pain with a grimace that she couldn't hide, even after cupping her hands around her nose.

She just stared at him over her fingers, eyes filling to the brim with tears that she herself didn't want to fall, but they did and it only stung his heart. Now he'd made her cry.

She shook her head, as though she could see what he was thinking, and dropped her hands into her lap. "What did I do to you?" she said, mostly to herself. To him she made sure her voice was clear, was unwavering. "This was _not_ your fault, Donnie."

She grimaced again, and had to pause to wipe her tears away. "I let that crystal get to me because I was greedy for all the power it gave me. There's no excuse behind it. I knew what it was doing to me, and I refused to listen to you when you tried to help me ... Did they tell you why I was able to break Za'Naron's control?"

He used his wrist to wipe his beak and shook his head.

She gave him a watery smile and reached up to brush her fingers over his cheeks. "They tried to remind me of all the things we've been through together. Casey talked about fighting Mutagen Man and going to space. Mikey brought up Master Splinter, and Ice Cream Kitty, and pizza." She chuckled at the thought. Of course Mikey would bring up pizza. "They tried to remind me that I was part of the family, that I was one of you guys."

She took her hand away from his face and any smile that had made it to her cheeks vanished again. "But I wouldn't hear them," she said. "I mean, I _could_ hear them, but it was like I was falling asleep, like their voices were really far off and I couldn't reach them, and I … didn't really care about what they were saying."

She paused, brushing her hair back behind her ear as she stared off to the side. He watched her, waiting, heart aching for reasons he could no longer explain. She looked back at him.

"And then Raph said your name—and all Iheard was your name. And it was like something woke me up. And I saw you. I saw you smiling. I saw you happy. And you were with me, by my side like always. And I didn't want to leave that. So I fought her … and I won."

He swallowed, but there seemed to be a baseball lodged in his throat. He wondered how that got there.

Her brow creased. "You were the one who saved me, Donnie—by always being there and believing in me and loving me unceasingly. And I couldn't thank you enough for that."

He grimaced and had to look away. To be thanked … was an odd feeling. Once upon a time, when he was a child, he'd allowed himself to become bitter by the lack of appreciation from his family. All the things he built for them and fixed for them and put aside because they needed something from him once had all been worthy of a simple "thanks," he thought. But over time the absence of that little word got to him less and less until he didn't care that he didn't hear it anymore. And when they met April, he never dared to expect or ask for any kind of thank you from her anyway, because he wasn't worthy of one. Everything he did for her, he did because he wanted to, because he loved her, because he had a duty to her as her best friend, as her teammate, as her protector, or whatever the heck she wanted him to be for her. To be thanked—especially for something he felt he'd failed at, and by April of all people—was an odd feeling.

"Donnie?"

He blinked and looked back to her. Somehow, the weight seemed even heavier, to the point that it was becoming unbearable. He wanted to shovel it out of his stomach, throw it up, anything. It had to go, because it was interfering with the way his eyes looked at her now. She was just as beautiful as ever, but all that brought him was pain, because he'd just realized for the first time ever that he was hopelessly trapped under her control. And she could do whatever she wanted with him, because no matter how much she glared at him, or scoffed at him, or brushed him off, or threw raging fits, no matter how agonizing it was to watch her excitement blossom when Casey came around, or how much it belittled his soul when she commented on how great of a friend he was, no matter how much she hurt him—even by literally ripping him apart molecule by molecule—he would never stop loving her. Even if he wanted to. And for the first time since the day they'd met, that terrified him.

So he couldn't answer her. All he had in him was to stare. And though he thought the swell of emotion had already come and gone, he realized very quickly that it was only a humble sample of whatever turmoil was coming now. And it overwhelmed him so quickly that he stood no chance against it. It surged forth without warning, pouring out of his eyes and crushing his chest to the point that he had to double over to reduce the pain.

He didn't care that his face buried itself in her lap, because it made no difference. She had him now—all of him—whether he'd wanted to give it all up or not.

He felt like a child, gasping for breath and sobbing in her arms, craving comfort from the very thing that brought him pain. And the vulnerability made him shiver with disgust. How had he let it get to this point? How had he allowed himself to follow her around like a puppy wherever she went, completely ignoring the shock collar around his throat? After finally being zapped hard enough, he was just realizing that it was far too late. She had violated every bit of him tonight—and the worst part was it wasn't even her fault, but it changed everything.

"I don't—want to do this anymore," he cried, gasping through his tears, arms squeezing her waist even though he was begging to be separated from her. "Please d-don't make me do it— _please_."

"I'm sorry," she said, crying with him, holding him back just as tightly because she didn't understand what he wanted. Her touched burned. "I'm so sorry, Donnie. I'm so sorry." She stroked the top of his head and rocked him as soothingly as she could. "What can I do? Tell me what I can do."

It was impossible to answer. He really didn't know what to tell her, other than to beg and plead that she not hurt him again. But the words wouldn't come out, so he just cried. He cried and he sobbed and he blubbered over her like a baby until his muscles were so tight he couldn't breathe. Then he just whimpered, and the sound was so foreign to him, so broken and sad and pathetic that he wanted nothing to do with it. Surely he was stronger than that, better than that? Surely he could pull himself together right now and walk out of her room, retreat home to the sewers where he belonged, living a life apart from humans and their rejection?

No. As it turned out, he could not. He didn't have the strength in him to. And so he stayed there, losing all of his tears to April O'Neil, allowing her to hold him, cooperating willingly when she laid him down next to her and held his face against her chest. And he hiccupped and sighed and sniffed until those tears were gone, but by then he could barely lift an arm, much less keep his eyelids from drooping. He was stuck there, and he stayed there, and that was how it was always going to be.


End file.
